GAL GADOT JEWISH SUPERHERO
FINDING A superhero to believe in, someone who truly represents you, is not an easy thing when you’re a girl. If anything, I used to keep my distance from the world of the superheroes because I was almost certain that it was a playground for the boys, a place of muscles and gunfights, where women were mere love interests, or pretty things to be rescued.
Sure, there was Lois Lane who was spirited and go-getting, but she didn’t have powers. And she was always looking dreamily into the eyes of super-buff Dean Cain. Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, was a landmark TV show during my childhood but the characters in it weren’t mine. Spider-Man wasn’t mine, nor was Batman. So I would capture superheroes where I could: Sally Gunnell, who won an Olympic gold medal for running in 1992, and Helen Sharman, the first Brit in space, who visited the Mir space station in 1991 and became the lead character in all my stories at the time. I wasn’t short of role models, but there was always something that was missing. Something that I was always searching for. I’m happy to say that nowadays I’m overrun with superheroes. Having found a sneaky entry into the world of comic books when I was working in a book shop, it’s become a world in which I’m now embedded. My novels for children are alternative superhero yarns, and I regularly attend book nights at my favourite comic book shops, and festivals around the country. My favourite hero? Kitty Pryde of the X-Men. She’s a rather relegated character in the feature films (played quietly by Ellen Page) but in the comic books she’s a computer genius, a school professor and a space explorer who can walk through walls.
Oh, and did I also mention that she’s Jewish? First discovering Kitty, seeing the frizzy curls of her early appearances and her proudly sporting a Star of David, made me realise that I did have a place in the superhero playground.
Here was someone who could represent me. Here was someone who was mine. I just wish that I’d found her when I was ten or twelve, not when I was in my mid-twenties. Even so, in a world that’s becoming saturated with blockbusting superhero movies, where cosplay and comic-cons are becoming normal weekend activities instead of secretive niche adventures of the uber-geeks, having representation at any age is incredibly important. To know that there’s room for you in there, and that you can be a part of it, is not a thing to be taken lightly.
This is why I am so excited about the emergence of Israeli actress, Gal Gadot. In early 2016, as a supporting character in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, she became the first big-screen manifestation of Wonder Woman, and is set to grace our screens again in 2017 in what will be the first modern comic-book adaptation in which a female character has taken the lead. I have no doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of geek girls who, just like me, are anxiously waiting for this film and praying with all our hearts that it doesn’t end up a colossal flop. The trailer may be promising, but trailers have lied to us before.
Why am I rooting for this incarnation of Wonder Woman in particular? Because she’s Jewish.
I’m not saying that Wonder Woman herself is about to take a trip to the mikveh or usher in Shabbat. She has always been presented as an ancient Grecian demi-goddess who has spent most of her life as a princess in the mythical Amazonian land of Themyscira. She was created by the psychologist William Moulton Marsten (who also invented the lie-detector test), alongside his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marsten and their partner Olive Byrne, and the character was inspired by early feminists such as Margaret Sanger. But her modern represen-